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Last week the news agency issued Drudge Retort with a takedown notice under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), requesting that the site remove the offending excerpts, arguing that by reproducing them the website had infringed AP's copyright.

What AP did not appear to have accepted was that linking the excerpts back to the original report, which Drudge Retort had done, was acceptable, whatever extra traffic that may have generated.

But such was the universally negative response to AP's action, that the agency quickly decided to suspend its action.

"We don't want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more

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positive way to do this," said Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of AP.

The company will now meet with bloggers to discuss the formulation of new guidelines for the re-use of content.

Both US and UK copyright law permit fair use for news reporting, as well in other fields such as education, research and reviewing. Generally it is accepted that journalists may quote small portions of an article, as long as the source is referenced and, in the case of the internet, a link back to the original content is provided.

But Kennedy thinks this goes to far, preferring that websites summarise AP content rather than simply reproduce it.

"Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see," he told the New York Times. "It is more consistent with the spirit of the internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context."

As Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of the Drudge Retort, points out, there a millions of people and websites sharing links and news reports. If AP does want to control how it's content can be used, it has a big fight on its hands. Indeed, its decision to provide guidelines rather than issue writs suggests that the news agency realises this.